The Judaean cultural context of community of goods in the Early Jesus Movement: Part V. Voluntary economic association and the creation of economic security through education and occupational training in the Essene fictive kinship groups of Ancient Judaea

This next part of my study: 1) depicts in greater depth the innovative, securing economic structures which Essenism had created in the region, demonstrating specifically: 2) that these cooperative economic structures secured the lives of children in the region who lacked support in local kinship structures; 3) that poor children who lacked support in local kinship structures received, instead, economic and social security through membership in new fictive kinship structures; 4) that these voluntarily created fictive kinship structures offered educational opportunities to girls and boys, and to young men and young women, the education thus bestowed constituting part of the method of securing the lives of previously unattached children and youth by offering them economically realistic occupational training and education on which to found secure future livelihoods; 5) that indigent elderly, both women and men, also otherwise unsupported in local kinship structures, received economic security through incorporation into the fictive kinship groups of the local community houses, within which they received effective charitable care; 6) that these elderly men and women gave generously, in return, of their wisdom, skill, time and effort in the education of children and youth taken in by the community houses, thereby training up a reciprocally grateful new core membership; and finally 7) that through the fictive kinship alliance created between the supported elderly, children and youth, a ‘reciprocity of the generations’ was founded and perpetuated through which rescued, able-bodied members of the community houses, having themselves attained economically secure adult lives through the largesse enabled by the cooperative economic and social structures of the community house, in turn expended economic resources, time and affection to caring for the elderly, especially when these, in the latter stages of their lives, became infirm and fully dependent upon the mutually covenanted fictive kinship city, town and town and village groups.